How air pressure and weather are related is not that difficult to understand. Even a child can approach this weather phenomenon with an experiment. To increase the air pressure in a transparent cylinder, all you have to do is press hard on a bellows - the barometer rises. A transparent tube leads from the cylinder to a second glass container. At the connection there is a valve that opens when a lever is pulled. How the air, driven by its own pressure, flows jerkily from the first into the second cylinder, can be seen from the movement of the wool threads in the transparent tube. A second effect becomes apparent at the experiment station, the thermal, the phenomenon that warm air rises upwards. In the second cylinder, a radiator heats the air.When it rises as a result, a spiral moves.
Jan Schiefenhövel
Freelance author in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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All of this can be tried out in the new weather and climate workshop in Offenbach's pedestrian zone.
The experiment does not stand on its own; it is intended to explain the emergence of weather phenomena.
How the force of the air pressure works outside can be read on a board on the wall.
The air pressure is not the same everywhere on earth because it depends on whether the sun is shining or not.
Meteorologists speak of a landscape of air mountains with higher pressure and valleys in which the air pressure is lower.
The sun often shines on the pressure mountains, the weather is usually not nice in the pressure valleys, there are clouds from which it can rain.
Wind tunnel in the workshop
In the information center, which is run by the German Weather Service together with the city, children can also experience the effect of the wind that blows from areas with high air pressure to areas with low pressure. You will find a wind tunnel in the weather workshop. The strength of the air movement can be adjusted with a rotary knob, a pointer on a scale shows the wind speed. Visitors can see what that means in practice from a yellow flag. At wind force 2, it just lifts off the mast and moves tiredly in the wind. But if you turn the control to wind force 8 or 9, the fabric flutters hectically in the storm and stretches to the side away from the mast. At the end of the wind tunnel, visitors can hold their hand in the airflow and feel how strong the wind is blowing on their skin.
What the wind strengths outside mean is in the explanation. At wind force 2, the draft can be felt on the face and moves leaves. With wind force 8 or 9, i.e. in a storm, it becomes dangerous outside because the draft is so strong that it breaks off twigs and branches from trees, lifts roof tiles and tears them off the roof.
How much depends on the weather and climate is shown by a globe on which the earth's climate zones are marked in different colors, from the hottest areas at the equator to the subtropical and temperate zones to the cold regions of the world, the subpolar zone and the polar zone in the Antarctic. On a playing field, the children can assign landscapes and animals to the climate zones; they have to consider where there is an ice desert, tundra, deciduous forest and rainforest and which climate characterizes the habitat of brown bears, camels and desert foxes. The information center wants to draw attention to climate change. It explains how the greenhouse effect warms the climate and how humans intensify the greenhouse effect, namely with carbon dioxide emitted by heating systems, cars and power plants. There are also tipswhat can be done about climate change.
Visitors to the weather workshop are also allowed to play meteorologists.
On a map of Germany they distribute numbers for the temperature and pictograms for the weather, a sun here and dark thunderclouds there.
The weather and climate workshop, Frankfurter Straße 39 in Offenbach, is open from Saturday, Tuesday to Friday from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.